The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is gaining momentum and we’re seeing more and more vendors roll out visions and product to support it. On Tuesday, April 30th, IBM announced an appliance to enable companies to manage and route the millions of machine to machine (M2M) small data messages created by the Internet of Things. Big [...]
Network Forecast: Need For WAN Optimization Growing
Jun 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Well it’s that time of year again — Memorial Day just passed, and summer has officially kicked off. The NHL playoffs are rolling along, my pool is opened up, and I’m prepping to have my kids get out of school and then bug me for snacks all day long as I try and work in [...]
WANop Provider Repositions to Security?
May 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Last week Blue Coat came out of hiding after going private in late 2011. Complete with a new logo, the company is re-launching itself by redefining the role of security within IT. Prior to going private, Blue Coat had spent months trying to establish itself in the WAN optimization space, and, while it accomplished that [...]
The Medium-Hanging Fruit for SDN
May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment
As hot as software-defined networking is today from a media perspective, there are still relatively few production deployments of it from companies not named Google and Baidu. The biggest challenge for mainstream enterprises is trying to understand what, exactly, one would do with an SDN. SDNs promise to deliver a more flexible, agile, programmable, virtual, [...]
It’s Time For Interop To Go Back To The Future
May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
I’ve been an analyst now for a little over a decade. Prior to my role as an analyst, though, I held many technical positions, including a long stint as a networking engineer. When I was an engineer, my favorite trade shows were Cisco Networkers and Networld + Interop. The value of Networkers was to get [...]
It’s Time for SDN Marketers to Step on the Gas
May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
There’s no networking topic I get more end-user inquiry on than software-defined networks (SDN). The types of questions I get are all over the map, making it difficult to get a good feel for what purchase intentions are. To get a better handle on what we might see in the way of SDNs investments over [...]
Yes, Size Does Matter (Especially When It Comes To ADC Performance)
Apr 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
I’m not sure why this happens, but it seems that every few years, this industry likes to debate the death of certain markets. Application Delivery Controllers, particularly the tried-and-true hardware platforms, have been under attack before and seem to be again. To me, the concept that you could just build ADC functionality into another product [...]
Silver Peak Makes Storage Replication Easy
Apr 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Prior to being an analyst I held many roles in corporate IT, including being responsible for protecting the company’s information, so I understand the absolute mission-critical nature of backup/restore and disaster recovery. However, I also understand that this is one of the hardest things to get right within corporate IT. I’ve often joked that every [...]
Happy Days at Big Switch
Mar 27, 2013 by 2 Comments
There’s an old song — I’m not sure who wrote it but I know Barbara Streisand sang it — that goes, “Happy days are here again, the skies above are clear again, so let’s sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again!” I’m sure that describes the mood over at SDN start-up [...]